It creeps up on you as you sit at your desk. You yawn, scan the web, check Facebook but still the ennui lingers. At some point almost every day we feel bored, at least for a little while. We’ve all experienced that feeling of listlessness, but what is boredom? Is it not having something exciting to do? Is it being unable to pay attention to what you’re doing?

One team of Canadian researchers was apparently interested enough in boredom to find out.

“Intuitively, it is pretty clear that boredom is a common human experience and little research has been done to bear out that fact,” says John Eastwood, an associate professor of psychology at York University in Toronto.